


LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 

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AN ADDRESS 



DELIVERED BEFORE 



THE IRVING SOCIETY 

OF 

ST. JAMES COLLEGE, 

FOUNTAIN ROCK, MARYLAND. 
AT THE 

PUBLIC CELEBRATION OF THE SOCIETY, 
COMMENCEMENT WEEK, JULY 9, I860. 



BY REV. C. H: HALL, D. D. 



PUBLISHED BY REQUEST. 



WASHINGTON, D. C. 

BUELL & BLANCHARD, PRINTERS. 
1860. 



F 



Irving Hall, July 11, 1860. 
To Rev. Charles H. Hall : 

Dear Sir : In behalf of the Irving Society, we would respectfully request 
a copy of your Address, for publication. 

We remain, with great respect, 

GEORGE B. SHATTUCK, 
GEORGE H. SHAFER, 
W. G. HARRISON, 

Committee. 

To Messrs. George B. SJiattucTc, George H. Shafer, and W. G. Harrison : 

Gentlemen : It gives me great pleasure to comply with your request ; 
and wishing you success in your labors after eloqueuce and art, and com- 
mending you to God and the word of His grace, 

I am yours, truly, 

CHARLES H. HALL. 
St. James College, July 11, I860. 



<^ 



ADDEESS 



The ideas which we form of eloquence and of the orator, from 
fifteen to twenty-five years of age, are of no ordinary import- 
ance to us, for many long days after this interesting period of 
our life has passed away. Between the two dates of our com- 
mon cycle of threescore and ten, which I have chosen, the pro- 
foundest wisdom has placed very much of the original of our 
after acts and principles. It is the seed-time of life. At fif- 
teen we ordinarily begin to think and feel — feel possibly more 
than think — yet, after a sort, think, too. The sun of reason 
rises in fogs of sentiment, romance, and fancy. The individual 
ego, is rather surprised to find a new and strange light rising 
upon it. The boy discovers that there are other egos, other 
sentient circles of life, winch will yet cross and contract his 
own. Hitherto he has lived as the butterflies, lighting by ne- 
cessity on other supports at times, and with a shorter flight than 
his own imagination supposes, but with very little practical 
knowledge of the life around and before him. He can at any 
time fly away to the blue skies, and sail through the upper deeps 
on the floating clouds. And Hope has only half made up her 
mind to do so, when the time convenient for it comes, as come 
it must. He can be a poet if he will, and, for all he knows, he 
may yet choose to be- He can rise to the highest achievements 
of eloquence, and command the applause of listening senates ; 
and he doubtless often ponders with himself the perplexing 
question, whether he will do so, or not ; whether he will occupy 
the place of " His Majesty the President," as our Japan friends 
have lately styled him, or will sublimely } T ield the honor, only 
waiting for him to choose, and sail to other lands, to rival the 
fame of the few missionaries whose deeds are chronicled among 
men. 

I frankly confess my admiration for all such boys. It is a 
glorious trick of fancy, that it thrills their young blood, and 



dignifies the nascent days of life with a a light and loveliness" 
that too soon pass away from earth. It is no shame that it is 
a delusion. Without such delusions, we are then only little 
animals. We grow, and may perhaps in time be very excellent 
citizens, but we shall walk a lower round of duty. The imagi- 
nation is God's gift. It cheers the child ; it gives a sacred re- 
pose to the old man. It fires us to exertion in our first efforts 
to put the carnal below the spiritual. It looks off the edge of 
time, when man has passed the dust and toil of his journey, 
and but for it would sink into listless indifference, and sees u a 
city without foundations," whose pearly gates are tinged by it 
with a splendor which warms the dull, chill blood of age, and 
lights him gently to his last sleep. If it deceives, it also re- 
veals ; if it tricks us, it is also inspired, and is the great dy- 
namic force of all noble and glorious action. The child under 
the fir-tree, playing away his sunny hours, while the mystic 
chemistry of Nature is building up its secret wonders of bone 
and muscle in the growing form, thinks " their little tops are 
close against the sky." The man, indeed, learns better, but, 
as the poet says : 

" Finds it little joy- 
To know he's farther off from heaven 
Than when he was a boy." 

And the boy, till fifteen, loves romance, and dotes on sentiment ; 
he loves Marmion, (terrible savage that he was,) or dreams with 
the Turk, in his guarded tent, 

" As wild of thought, and gay of wing, 
As Eden's garden bird." 

Dream on ! Let it not be my hand that wakes you, fair 
child ! dream on ! though the castle of thy hopes be as baseless 
as the fabric of a vision. Dream on 1 till some softer hand may 
stir the curls on thy brow, and possibly breathe to thee in the 
sweet music of love, with prattling voices in chorus, the knowl- 
edge that every man of us has something better to do in this 
world than dream. 

After fifteen, a boy who has anything in him out of which to 
make a man, begins to awake to the necessities of his existence, 
both in his own soul and in the world outside of it, which he 
may wisely study. He may not be " President of these United 
States," though his nursery rhyme has taught him that its 
privileges would number among them an unbounded license 
over the residuum of the sugar cane, and an unusual vibration 
of the gates leading to the White House. He may not com- 
mand listening senates without a vast amount of labor in ad- 
vance, and not then by only a voice of thunder, impregnable 
logic, and rhetoric sweetly tuneful as the spheres. He may not 
even always trust to have the soft hand which now yields to his, 



or the undivided homage of the eyes which now speak very cu- 
rious things to him. The stream of his life may ripple on 
banks of roses and nodding cowslips ; hut there is a swifter cur- 
rent becoming visible in it — a sound of far-off possibilities is 
mingling with its murmur, and the hot sun is up. He begins 
to see life as a problem for his solution. He wakes, to find in 
this land of ours some thirty millions of people, who have just 
his rights, just his modes of being, and just his hopes and fan- 
cies. Marmion, on his fiery war-horse, he begins to think, 
would do very ill in the streets of our cities. He would ride 
down our little ones, and run against — no knightly De Wilton 
with lance in rest, but only — the constable.* 

He may rail at the times, in revenge, and sigh for " the good 
old days." Or he may jump the present, and sing of " a good 
time coming." But the very best time for us, the time that a 
Mind which rules this great world with infinite wisdom and 
love and beauty has fixed on as best for you and me, is just 
this blessed summer day, in the year of our Lord eighteen hun- 
dred and sixty. We cannot better it by sighs. We cannot 
go backward, nor can we hurry it. Let us to work, and use it. 

M Trust no future, howe'er pleasant, 
Let the dead past bury its dead ; 
Act, act in the living present, 

Heart within, and God o'erhead." 

How beautiful are these words of that quiet poet of Cam- 
bridge ! How they have spoken out what is in ten myriad 
young souls ! How reasonable, wise, and practical, they are ! 
Let me, in the spirit of them, speak to you, young gentlemen, 
of the one theme for which I may rationally suppose that your 
debating society has been established, and of which you are 
wishing me now to say my say. 

Your ideas of eloquence, from fifteen to twenty-five — pardon 
me if I venture to unveil the thoughts which are common to us 
all, yet which we do not quite choose to confess to each other. 
To do it, I must say, first of all, that I do it reverently ; that 
I go back on my own course, and, by a sleight of memory, join 
you in your seats, and listen while I speak. 

What is Eloquence ? It is simply out-speaking — e-loquor, 
to speak out. It is human revelation; the bringing out the 
word which is a living reality in us; the living truth within, 
which men need, which they will receive, which they will rev- 
erence, which will win them, convince them, rule them ; the 
word which will drive their bad passions scared into dark- 
ness ; which will soothe their sorrows, check their anger, hush 
their riot, annul the icy touch of despair ; the word which will 

* Or an omnibus. — Prin. Dev. 



raise their courage, kindle afresh their energy, thrill their bet- 
ter soul, and give to all good and noble powers a new ascend- 
ency in the strife with the bad and base temptations around 
them. Eloquence is one* single living word, spoken in season ; 
vital in its birth, as it springs out of a soul in the act of labor ; 
leaping out of a travailing brain, as Minerva from the head of 
Jove, in full armor, polished, glittering, terrible with spear and 
casque, able at once to do battle for right ; a new creation in 
the fight of life ; a living power, better and grander in its divine 
might and majesty than a regiment of men. Eloquence is the 
gift of God. It comes down from heaven, for it does not belong 
to the baser things of earth. It comes out of a soul, which, 
filled with holy thought, rises above us, and for the time utters 
oracles beyond gainsaying, and too glorious to be questioned. 

Let me cite three instances in illustration of my faith, the 
better for my purpose that they are as commonly known among 
you as household words. Demosthenes, it it said, shook the 
throne of Philip, and held back for a time the destinies of 
Greece by his eloquence. He rose before his countrymen, and 
his mere words were supreme over them. The Macedonian 
terror for the time was forgotten. 

Now, what may your fancies of him be ? Shall I tell my 
own ? They were possibly ; why not do likewise now 1 If it 
has been done, it may be done again. If man has thus risen 
to a great, majestic victory, by the mere force of his single will, 
he may do it again. Let us shake the power of tyrants. Let 
us prepare, in dark cellars, and with mouths pebble-filled, for 
the day when the star-spangled banner shall be in danger ; 
when we can rise before our trembling fellow-citizens, and with 
voice of semi-inspiration drive off the invading foe from our 
shores, and come back, in triumphal fashion, to honors and 
admiring myriads. The maidens and others shall raise their 
paeans, and shout, " Saul hath slain his thousands, but this fair 
and ruddy shepherd-boy his ten thousands." 

Is there nothing of this delusive trickery in fancy 1 Elo- 
quence is all that I have said ; who, then, may not speak out 1 
We will be eloquent ! ah, wait a while ; we have forgotten 
some things. This fancy is at the bottom of a ceaseless stream 
of what is called spread-eagle eloquence in this land of ours. 
It rings out abundantly, on the Fourth of July, from Maine to 
Georgia, as the drum-beat of parading soldiery ; and, like theirs, 
the sound is very much produced by inflated skins of innocent 
sheep. Sundry things are beyond us. Thank God that they 
are beyond us. Thank God that before you can thus rise up 
to receive the meed of rescuing a nation, the nation must be in 
danger; men must be in grief, and you must grieve with the 
saddest of them ; and our nation is not in grief. 



There are demagogues, I know, who would see the fair fields 
of our land in peril, if it would give them the notoriety which 
would inevitably disgrace them. There are fancies working in 
the hot blood of many men, which, if indulged, would clothe the 
land in mourning. They would fain*be even as Attila, " the 
scourge of God," and have the spot where their horse's hoof 
fell without vegetation forever, that they might march before 
the crowd, like the procession of a theatre, the observed of all 
observers. 

But we leave Attila to our friend Carusi and his painted 
canvas, or if he should get out into the streets and begin a row, 
we hand him over to the police. Imagination needs the stimu- 
lus of ancient examples ; and the young man without imagina- 
tion can never be eloquent, for he can never imagine the wants 
of other men, nor feel in himself their griefs, and speak out the 
remedy for them. But we need something more. Philip of 
Macedon cannot now call forth his one Demosthenes. Philip 
can be better managed by Dahlgren guns and Minie balls. 
The age when one man could accomplish this potent fame was 
an age which we can no more reproduce now, than we can bring 
back the epoch of the Crusaders. The one man day is passed. 
It is drowned in printer's ink, and fettered with red tape. We 
must take our comfort for the change as we may, but for you 
and me, depend upon it, no Demosthenic era will ever dawn ; 
or if it does, we shall mourn the triumph in profoundest sad- 
ness. I doubt not that he was the saddest man of all Greece. 
The words he uttered came from a man who had wept m a cel- 
lar, as well as studied periods there ; had quailed before the 
ocean's roar before he compelled the wilder waves of human 
passion into silence. Eloquence — remember it well — is a stern, 
sober gift, as all spiritual things are. You must first learn in 
anguish to control your own heart, and its passions, before you 
can be worthy to control the souls of other men. 

Another orator, whose facile pen and Augustan age gave him 
the opportunity of directing the fancies and principles of men, 
in regard to his art, more than any single man, was Cicero. 
And though Cicero has left orations far superior in grace and 
finish to the four against Catiline ; in my opinion, he culminated 
as an orator in the first of these four. The defence of Milo 
reads better ; but in the one he was an orator, in the other he 
was a graceful coward. In the one case he spake as a hero ; 
in the other, he trembled before the base minions of Clodius. 
In the one, he deserved a place among the gods of his country's 
Pantheon ; in the other, he almost merited a cell in the Mam- 
mertine prison. Let us recall the vision of his glory. 

It was a fair Italian day without ; but Rome was a moral 



earthquake, just ready to burst out. Terrible thoughts scared 
men ; women and children were palsied with fear. The most 
awful hour of a country's history was upon them, and at any 
moment the cry of horror might arise, to tell that the curse had 
fallen. The Senate assembled ; and Catiline, wily, skilful, 
cautious, civil, sedate, honorable, and scrupulous Catiline, 
whose hellish wisdom had warily worn the garb of legal blame- 
lessness, came into the Senate-house to take his honorable seat 
with the rest. Why not 1 Who of all the Senators there 
could unravel the meshes of his plot ? Who of them could dive 
into the pestilential vaults of his dark soul, and unearth the 
Guy Fawkes, and betray the secret train which was to blow 
that Senate to the winds. He had done no single thing which 
a common mind could seize upon, and charge upon him as a 
certain evidence of guilt. He is smiling as he walks. He will 
take his seat and join in the debate, and by the sunset he will 
raise his standard, and bring the head of accursed, prattling 
Cicero, to the earth in death. Go, and read again the debate 
in Sallust, and see the difficulty of the position on that memora- 
ble d y. 

Cicero dashed upon him with a divine impulse* He seems, 
for once, to have forgotten himself. He tracks the plot step 
by step, he rouses the fears, the patriotism, the indignation, of 
his auditors. The marble statues seem to nod to his eye. He 
almost raves with inspiration, as if the immortal gods of Rome 
had taken possession of him for the time, and hid the orator in 
the patriot. He scorches the traitor by his vehement, resistless 
zeal, and drives him from the city, howling curses as he flies, 
He had conquered him, and dispersed the cloud by that one 
oration, and saved his country. 

It was a glorious achievement of manliness, state-craft, art, 
and eloquence. I pardon him, that he could never all forget 
it. A man who has once been filled with so divine an impulse 
might well believe that it was something more than an individ- 
ual triumph. 

And may not boys be pardoned too, if, as they spell out 
u Quousque tandem, O Catilina," they catch the fiery impulse, 
and long to do and dare as he did - y if they suffer tricksy fancy 
to build a senate chamber, and people it with citizens of honor, 
(not forgetting the smiling galleries,} and long for the day when 
they shall rise in their seats, amd stop some giant evil in its hour 
of success, roll back the tide of ruin from the land, unearth the 
secret villainy, and drive away from the sacred deposit of our 
Constitution the wicked hands which are about to destroy it? 

Allow me to hope that in our time no one of you may have 
this distinguished privilege — to suggest, that exciting as. the 



9 

triumph of another such orator as Cicero might be, the presence 
of his Catiline had better be spared. For, though Cicero was 
the honored saviour of his country, he saved it but for a short 
time. The fire of his eloquence was soon to expire. It graced 
a crumbling government. It is far better to read of him, and 
his friend Cato, and his rival Julius Caesar, than to have them 
here among us. Put them in our Senate Chamber, and they 
would be at bowie knives or pistols, by way of persuasive argu- 
ments. And possibly the boys who do resort to those rhetori- 
cal arts in that building, have once, in bygone days, fancied in 
their turn that they would be as patriotic as he was, and have 
found out their mistake before this. They rise in their seats 
to scorch each other, and promise to reveal depths of corrup- 
tion, at which Catiline would wonder as an innocent babe; but 
somehow our Catilines do not run from the revelation, and our 
Ciceros sound very tame, as we read their philippics in the 
Daily Globe. 

But in all earnestness let me say to you, that it is a vain 
fancy to read history, as if such scenes as it offers could be 
again enacted. Our bema is no more that of a Cicero, than 
our country is a' Rome. If eloquence is out-speaking, it is 
what ice have to say, what belongs to our nineteenth century ; 
and we must say that which is within us, not what was in the 
old Romans. 

Again let me bid you note, that eloquence is no holiday thing. 
Pleasant as it is for me to stand here, and look over your young 
faces, and join you for the time in your festive hours, it will be 
fruitless, if I cannot impress upon you that eloquence is your 
whole self speaking, your whole self so engaged that for the 
time you forget yourself, and the whole soul burns before your 
hearers. And burning is not pleasant. 

This reminds me of an anecdote, which may not be digni- 
fied, but will certainly be illustrative. There was in one of our 
cities a " sensation preacher." This class of people are the 
most luckless of our citizens. Avoid them as you would the 
plague. He was brilliant, dazzling, noisy, and crowds flocked 
to hear him. 

Now, as I read the New Testament, and human life, the 
preacher's eloquence is honest out-speaking of the Gospel, as he 
knows it. A great light shines in his own soul, and he cannot 
keep it in — and so out it comes ; it comes out as semi-inspired 
teaching. It is an earnest, simple, straight-forward work, to 
say to men what men ought to hear, and mostly say it in plain 
American. But a sensation preacher is a mingling of the Cice- 
ronian with Massillon, Whitefield, and honest old Peter Cart- 
wright, who himself is not one of this race. He aims at a 



10 

scene, and even the most abstract dogma of his sect becomes 
suddenly dramatic, and struts or dances with galvanic life before 
us, as he beats the Bible, and u tears a passion to tatters." 

The individual of whom I speak was a thief — not as bad as 
Judas, but an eclectic thief, and not one of whom the police 
could take notice; he simply dressed himself in other men's 
thoughts. An old man came with the crowd to hear him, and 
sat beneath the pulpit. As an orotund passage rolled over his 
head, he muttered, half audibly, "That's Doddridge!" an- 
other came— " That's South ! " another—'- That's Chalmers." 
The preacher heard and felt the blows ; and, leaning over the 
pulpit in a rage, burst out upon him in a violent and vulgar in- 
vective. The old man, without moving a limb, simply responded 
as before, " That's his own /" And that which is our own is 
our eloquence. It is the man who speaks out, and the man is 
not the tongue, nor the thought only, not often the man we pre- 
tend, but the real man, the heart, the life, the courage, the 
honest, genuine, outspoken man himself. When Cicero with- 
ered Catiline, the whole man shone in light. When he trem- 
bled before the faction of Clodius, the sweetly modulated logic 
and polished rhetoric of the oration " Pro Milone" do not save 
us from a feeling of contempt. Let us not forget, in justice to 
him, that he was not always so — that he also wrote, like the 
bayings of a wounded lion, the philippics against Anthony — 
which cost him, and he knew the price as he wrote them — his 
head. 

What you have to learn is, that in this American life of ours, 
we want to hear the man. We will not put up with shams, 
except in pulpits. We want men to speak out. If the voice 
is sweet as a summer wind, or rolling as muttering thun- 
ders, in great diapason tones of harmony, well. If the logic is 
the result of long and arduous training, until it plants its blows 
between the very eyes of a subject, terse, rapid, Heenan-like, 
better; if the rhetoric be, as among us, only an Everett can 
effect, better still ; if the fancy flit along the line of discourse, 
revealing whole avenues of co-ordinate thought, and suggesting 
more than it speaks, better yet. But behind all, above and 
through all this, the orator of this land must speak out what 
is in him. The power to do this is the power divine. 

I find one man who has been able to do this in our country. 
Others did it, and do it, for I am no skeptic of my country's 
glory. She produces, at the right moment, just the man, or 
men, which are wanted, whether to scale the walls of Monterey, 
fight the icebergs of the Pole, or unlock the gates of Japan. 
And they know well how to speak the word they want, whether 



11 

it be to say, " We have met the enemy, and they are ours ! " 
or to sow " a little more grape" on the plains of Buena Vista. 
But we have had, as Greece and Rome had, in the times of 
the two men I have mentioned, our crisis, and our Heaven-sent 
man to meet it ; a man of whom Thomas Jefferson has said, 
" that he was the greatest orator that ever lived : " to whom he 
has awarded a praise even higher, in his estimation, that (i he cer- 
tainly gave the first impulse to the ball of the Revolution."* 
He took a part of his education with a fishing-rod in his hand, 
and studied his eloquence very much from the running brooks. 
A difficult and dangerous school is this, young gentlemen. You 
need not pay tuition at it, or it will be paid you again in tears 
and vain regrets. You will be as foolish to do so, as one would 
be to ride out on the country roads to-night, and practice the 
part of Rob Roy McGregor, which Wordsworth says was 

" The good old rule — the simple plan, 
That they should get who have the power, 
And they should keep who can.'' 

The youth who rises upward, breaks through necessity, con- 
quers disadvantages, and meets a great occasion with the elo- 
quent power of majestic self-possession, is of another stuff 
from the sentimentalist, who is recreant to his duties, neglects 
his privileges, and comes back from his profound studies in the 
woods and by the brooks, a trifling, sickly, and rheumatic scio- 
list. The training which a man may have at a plough-handle 
or a blacksmith's anvil may fit him for honored deeds, be- 
cause of the mental energy and the moral habits really so 
trained ; but the energy and the training are not magic gifts of 
ploughs or anvils. 

But be this as it may. One hundred years ago, England and 
America were beginning to feel the throes of a coming revolu- 
tion. Great wildernesses and Indian fights had cut in upon the 
European ideas of our ancestors. Loyalty grew sick and pined, 
three thousand miles from home, and neglected at that. The 
King had sold the country, and forgotten it. His statesmen 
were quite too busy with other things, to cast a care across the 
broad Atlantic. Men had cut down forests and cleared lands, 
and planted corn and tobacco, and fought " red devils," ttve 
best they could. In doing so, without any assistance from home, 
they somehow discovered that they could do it and dispense 
with help. They had occasional aid, and Braddock came over 
to deploy splendidly in swamps, w T here he made very sad work 
of it. Marmion might as well have arrayed his band in steel 
harness, and charged on their red foes. Men thenceforward . 
distrusted the old feudalism the more. They had some things 

* Wirt's Life of Patrick Henry, pp. 54, 59. 



12 

to do in Massachusetts and Virginia, which could not be learned 
in Oxford, or at the Court of St. James. And they were men 
grown, self-reliant and independent, before they dreamed that 
any sinner could ever think of defying the authority over them of 
his Majesty by the grace of God, King George the Third. Fol- 
lowing the plough and wielding the axe, they had strong mus- 
cles ; trailing the war-path and swimming rivers, they had good 
wind; " sighting" Indians and other " varmint " around forest 
trees and through jackvines, they had an unpleasant knack of 
the rifle and tomahawk. And thus Nature had put them all to 
school ; and they were big boys, and only did not know that 
feudalism, like the malaria, could not cross salt water, and 
that they were men, with certain inalienable rights, which no 
power on earth could ever take from them. 

But they began to produce wealth in the Colonies, and the 
mother country at once became anxious for their moral regimen. 
She proposed to send over her kindly lessons of wisdom, and 
train her forest children in the way they should go, by taxes 
and other testimonies of her interest ; but she was an age too 
late. 

Yet, in Virginia especially, the altered condition of the two 
people was singularly hindered by many circumstances from 
being declared openly. Little lords here still aped the manners 
of lords at home, and pride and aristocracy flourished on the 
plantations and in the towns of James river and the Rappa- 
hannock. The New England Puritans could speak out their 
complaints, and no thanks to them. They had learned to do 
so in nasal tones before they left Delft Haven. But the " Old 
Dominion " was loyal ; good or bad, she could not quite forget 
the time when, despite the successes of Cromwell's Roundheads, 
she had remained bravely loyal to Church and King. 

You may imagine the crisis without my description. It was 
at its climax, when there walked into the old Raleigh Tavern, 
at Williamsburgh, a tall, thin man, " dressed in very coarse 
apparel," with a series of resolutions in view before him, (though 
written by himself, to be presented by an aristocratic neighbor,) 
to say the word which then seethed in all men's minds, and yet 
none dared utter it. The aristocrats were perplexed ; they 
felt it coming, but they dared not yet, without a farther provo- 
cation, break away from the sacred ties of home, and peril all. 
No ; it wanted a man of Nature — a man of the tiers etat — a 
plebeian — who had not so much to lose as to give him a mo- 
ment's pause, whose whole soul could kindle with the tremen- 
dous word then in the hearts of all, and though its utterance 
would cost him not only the countenance of his friends and ac- 
quaintances, but possibly his head too, would not fear or 



13 

falter, as he set the ball in motion, and sent over the earth the 
one great, imperishable American word, which shall live forever, 
in all human hearts — the word Independence. 

I confess to a child's admiration for the scenic effect of that 
birth-hour of liberty, as described in the history of his life. 
Says Wirt : " The cords of argument, with which his adversa- 
ries frequently flattered themselves that they had bound him 
fast, became packthreads in his hands. He burst them with 
as much ease as Samson did the bands of the Philistines. He 
seized the pillars of the temple, shook them terribly, and seemed 
to threaten his opponents with ruin. It was an incessant storm 
of lightning and thunder, which struck them aghast. The 
faint-hearted gathered courage from his countenance, and cow- 
ards became heroes, while they gazed upon his exploits. " * 

The excitement was at its height in 1765, when Patrick 
Henry uttered the famous words — " Caesar had his Brutus, 
Charles the First his Cromwell, and George the Third " — what ! 
Shall he dare to finish the sentence ? Shall he pollute our aris- 
tocratic and loyal ears by it? No. " Treason ! " cried the 
Speaker. "Treason" came from every side of the House. 
Henry, rising to his full height, did 7iot say it ; but the very 
not saying was the most tremendous utterance possible of what 
all then felt. He added, with firmest emphasis — " may profit 
by their example. If that be treason, make the most of it." 
He led all men by tln3 siopesis just to the edge of a precipice, 
and showed them what was yawning beneath them. It was one 
flash of lightning, striking nowhere, killing no one, crossing no 
law, nothing treasonable spoken, but flashing off into the depths 
below, and revealing them. Every man in Williamsburgh that- 
night pictured to himself how that sentence was destined to be 
finished. It was a glorious scene, a purely American scene, 
the first ellipsis between the two points of which was cradled 
the Revolution. 

Would you have done it ? Fancy may say to you what she 
will, but I will conclude with a few kindly words of advice, and 
thank you for your attention. I have spoken to you of the 
dreams of the unchastened imagination, in the years when fancy 
stands sidewise, and " conceals every thorn, but reveals every 
flower." Let me not be supposed to intend simply discourage- 
ment of such dreams. Much that is in them will perish ; but 
they indicate great truths. The simple problem — and how- 
important — is to see these dreams change happily into solid, 
useful, practical life; to find, as the unreal light has passed 
away, it has given place to a sounder, grander, holier light, in 
all our consciousness. 

* Wirt's Life of Patrick Henry, page 83. 



14 

If I have defined eloquence aright, the first corollary from 
my argument is plain — be all that you mean to speak out. There 
will, I trust, and you should not doubt, be noble hours in the 
future for you all — hours when the words which you may be 
called to utter, from an honest heart and well- trained mind, 
moved upon by powers almost consciously above your own con- 
trol, may be winged with wonderful might and majesty to 
others. To be ready for such hours, is your work — is God's 
gift. To say those words, you have two lines of duty and 
work — one to cultivate assiduously all the arts of graceful, cor- 
rect, and musical utterance ; the other to cultivate, in the fear 
of God, in reverence for your work, and in patient endurance, 
that inner man, which is, at such moments, to speak out. 

Eloquence is serious work. It is the sum, the issue, the 
aroma of life, the sweet fragrance of the healthy, living, patri- 
otic and virtuous soul. Bushels of roses wither and die, to 
distil only a few drops of their precious attar, which enchants 
all. The rules of elocution are often confounded with it, or at 
least supposed to be the sufficient preparation for it. They 
bear about the same relation to it that the cradle does to the 
infant, or the schoolmaster's rod to the boy, it helps to disci- 
pline. They are necessary instruments, useful to an end, then 
very usefully forgotten. Demosthenes had to use pebbles, and 
depend upon it, you must w T ork. You may as well undertake 
to sing the Stabat Mater or the Miserere without a maestro, as 
to gain command over the voice without mastery of elocution. 
The voice is the most delicate, arbitrary instrument in the 
world. You may carelessly abuse it, and damage all ears. 
You may choke it, stifle it ; you may howl or shriek or mut- 
ter with it, and find enough to do it with you ; but if you 
will speak out to any purpose, you must patiently learn to do 
it in clear, wholesome, easy, natural, orotund, resonant speak- 
ing. The power to do this is very rare among our people. 

You must study language as the vehicle of your own thought — 
all the powers and possibilities of the words you are constantly 
using. You must purify your daily speech by the rules of good 
taste and courtesy. As a swearer lets slip an oath, so a vulgar 
mind shows its coarseness, insensibly. You must store the mind 
with all kinds of useful knowledge which it can healthily digest, 
nor be satisfied with any study until you begin to think upon it 
yourself — until it begins to be suggestive. 

And then, beyond all else, you must cultivate the whole man. 
Be honest, be true to nature, to your country, and to God. 
Scorn mean and little and bad things. Rise to that position 
that you do nothing and think nothing that you are ashamed of. 
Be pure, that the Father of all may be pleased to touch your 



15 

lips with fire. The palsying touch of unbelief in honor and 
nobility in man, is on our land. Rise above it, by having that 
in you which you would see or rouse in others. Then, even if 
you are not called to command Senates or to sway astonished 
multitudes, you may comfort yourself that you can speak out 
and compass all the legitimate objects of manly ambition. You 
may speak words to men as you find them, which shall be living 
principles. You may cultivate the eloquence which has fame 
and reward beyond the confines of time — the outspeaking of a 
soul trained, exalted, and purified, by its diviner powers and 
gifts. 

I leave with you three maxims of eloquence — one from each 
of the orators of whom I have spoken. Ponder them. If rightly 
conceived, they contain whole essays of thought. 

Demosthenes once being asked, wherein the secret of eloquence 
lay, replied, " action ," or rather, in its best sense, " acting, 
acting, acting ; " not the acting of the stage-player, nor the 
acting of the hypocrite, but the being for the time that which 
you represent. 

Cicero has a famous contrast, only partly true, as violent 
contrasts always are, in the proverb, u Poeta nascitur, orator 
fit" — the orator becomes. He grows, by labor and the healthy 
growth of all his powers, up to his position of command. 

And on the back of the original copy of those Virginia reso- 
lutions concerning the Stamp act, Patrick Henry wrote in later 
years, as the result of his own recollections of them, and his 
experience of men : * " Reader, whoever thou art, remember 
this, and in thy sphere, practice virtue thyself, and encourage 
it in others." 

Wirt's Life of Patrick Henry, page 76. 



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